The packaging for prescription medications has not changed much over the years. However, the labeling requirements for prescriptions have grown more complex, leading to potentially significant confusion by consumers. Problems related to prescription bottle labeling, and pharmaceutical product labeling in general, are well known and have been documented extensively. In general terms, the root cause of these problems is the large amount of information required to be displayed in a very small area. This information includes patient data, pharmacy data, prescription data, physician data, cautionary data, drug information, pharmacy marketing information, required government warnings, legal disclaimers, dosage instructions, etc. So much data is required that pharmacies must also include additional printed, folded sheets of “drug facts” as part of the prescription package handed to the consumer. The challenge has been to include as much relevant information on the prescription bottle itself such that critical information stays with the medication, while keeping the bottles relatively inexpensive and keeping the labeling process efficient for a pharmacist.
Pharmacy medication bottles are inconsistent from one manufacturer to another and from one retailer to another. Prescription bottles are also labeled inconsistently from one pharmacy to another. In any given household, multiple users may have multiple prescriptions from multiple pharmacies. All of the conflicting labeling standards leave the consumer to hunt for the correct information on each bottle from each different pharmacy. In addition, the small print sizes usually found on round cylindrical bottles greatly increases difficulty of use for consumers, particularly the elderly—who often have compromised eyesight, decreased mobility, and limited tolerance for confusing labels with tiny print on a curved surface.
The label is only part of the problem. The actual geometry of prescription bottles exacerbates the issues. Bottles must be picked up while simultaneously rotated to be read clearly. They are difficult to open and fall over easily. For cylindrical style pill bottles and other prescription bottles with a typical “neck with round cap” opening, it can be difficult to remove just one pill at a time. These traditional pill bottle shapes often force the contents to be “dumped into hand” to remove a single pill, which causes spillage. Larger pills make the problems even worse, as these pills can get stuck inside the bottle and must be removed with a finger . . . and it must be a finger that does NOT have arthritis or other injuries. In the case of certain bottle shapes, particularly bottles similar to those depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 7,413,082, by Adler, and U.S. Pat. No. 8,458,994, by Guschke, the pills can become stuck or jammed into the tight corners of the bottle. Removing stuck pills becomes a major difficulty for elderly users who have no good option to dislodge the pills (e.g. shaking causes spills, a small knife damages pills, a single finger cannot quite reach, etc.), or worse, they simply lose the medication altogether.
Finally, and most importantly, current pill bottles are difficult to manage from a manufacturing and distribution standpoint. Most pharmacy bottles are merely dumped into a box or bag for shipment to local pharmacies and do not nest (or stack) easily for volume shipments at the wholesale level. Some large volume retail pharmacies regularly dispense over 2000 prescriptions in a single day. Mail order pharmacies can dispense tens of thousands of bottles daily. Bottle management, shipping, and storage have become notable and significant problems in the pharmacy industry. In addition, cylindrical bottles require different caps for each bottle size, requiring extra inventory management and storage. Existing pill bottle containers are not designed to nest together efficiently for shipment. Some slightly tapered cylindrical pill bottle shapes are capable of very limited nesting, although when forced into this configuration, the arrangement often creates unwanted suction that can stick the bottles together so tightly that they must be disposed of altogether. If all of this wasn't problem enough, many of the more complex flat sided bottles shapes (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,413,082 by Adler; U.S. Pat. No. 8,814,216 by Estep; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,881,648 by Hagerty) require a far more expensive “blown” molding process for manufacture rather than simple injection molding. It is well known that several large retail chains in the United States each dispense over one (1) billion prescriptions per year, per retail chain. With bottle volumes in the billions, these distribution and manufacturing issues, when taken together, translate into tens of millions of dollars in extra expense per drugstore chain. The difficulty is how to create a user-friendly bottle which is also inexpensive at the wholesale level. Simple injection molding can cost one-half to one-fifth the cost of more complicated designs, with shipping, storing, and labeling efficiencies creating additional benefits.